Learn about PXP's transaction risk screening service.
Our transaction risk screening service is designed to help businesses identify and prevent fraudulent transactions in real-time. We use advanced machine learning and Artificial Intelligence to analyse transactions and detect suspicious activity by assessing various factors such as device information, customer behaviour, historical transactional data, and location.
With transaction risk screening, you benefit from:
- Real-time fraud detection: Instantly evaluates transactions using AI and behavioural analytics to identify and prevent fraudulent activity before it impacts the business.
- Flexible risk strategy: Supports multiple evaluation approaches (e.g., pre- or post-authorisation) and allows configuration at the merchant level to align with specific risk appetites.
- Reduced chargebacks and losses: By accurately flagging high-risk transactions, the service helps prevent unauthorised payments and significantly lowers chargeback rates.
- Enhanced customer experience: Minimises false declines by allowing legitimate transactions to proceed smoothly, ensuring a seamless and trustworthy payment experience.
- Data-enriched decisions: Leverages a combination of device, behavioural, transaction, and network data to make more accurate and context-aware fraud decisions.
- Compliance support: Supports industry and regulatory requirements such as PSD2, 3DS, and SCA, helping you stay compliant while managing risk effectively.
For each transaction, you'll receive a risk score that quantifies the likelihood of fraud based on real-time data analysis. This score typically ranges from low to high, with higher scores indicating a greater risk of fraudulent activity.
The risk score is calculated using AI-driven algorithms and takes into account a wide range of signals, including:
- The device used for the transaction.
- The geographic location of the customer.
- Matching patterns associated with known fraudulent behaviours.
- The customer's purchase history and velocity.
- Whether the payment method or instrument has previously been linked to fraud.
The score itself doesn't directly approve or decline a transaction. Instead, it acts as a critical input into a decisioning engine configured by you, which evaluates the score against preset thresholds and rules.
For example:
Score < 300 → Accept (low risk)Score 300-600 → Review (medium risk)Score > 600 → Reject (high risk)
In more advanced setups, the score can be combined with other rule conditions such as:
IF Risk Score > 600 AND Payment Method = PayPal AND Country = BR, THEN Outcome = Reject.
You configure these rules and determine the final outcome of the evaluation:
- Accept: Proceed with transaction authorisation.
- Reject: Block the transaction before authorisation or capture.
The transaction risk screening service supports two integration modes:
- Standalone: For a standalone fraud screening service and flexibility around when and how to invoke risk screening.
- Integrated: For a simplified integration and a consistent enforcement of risk screening rules.
You subscribe to the risk screening service independently of PXP's payment gateway services. This decoupled approach enables businesses of all sizes to use our advanced fraud prevention capabilities without relying on or integrating with the payment processing flow.
Regardless of your integration mode, you have the choice between two assessment flows: pre-authorisation or post-authorisation. You can change the assessment flow at any point.
The transaction is evaluated for fraud before the payment authorisation request is initiated. You collect device and transaction data, then call the risk screening API. If the transaction is deemed low-risk, you then proceed with payment authorisation. Otherwise, the transaction is blocked before it reaches the issuer.
Key benefits:
- Prevents high-risk transactions from being authorised.
- Saves on processing and chargeback costs.
- Reduces fraud at the entry point.
The risk screening takes place after the payment has been authorised by the issuer. Once approved, you trigger the risk screening API. Based on the risk outcome, the transaction can then either be captured or voided.
Key benefits:
- Useful when immediate authorisation is required.
- Adds a fraud check layer before final settlement.
- Allows you to reverse transactions that are deemed risky.
The transaction risk screening service can be enabled at either the merchant group level or the individual merchant level, offering flexibility in how the service is applied across the business.
When you subscribe at the merchant group level, it's automatically enabled for all merchants within that group. This ensures consistent risk screening policies across your entire portfolio and simplifies management.
Alternatively, you can enable the service for specific merchants independently, giving you more granular control over which entities within a group use the service.